DARLINGTON, S.C. — Imagine the Masters golf tournament leaving Augusta, Ga., the Kentucky Derby being run in November or the Green Bay Packers moving to Milwaukee.

Sports blasphemy of the highest order.

Residents of tiny Darlington, S.C. — population 6,236 — and NASCAR traditionalists from every corner experienced much the same slap in the face in 2003 when the Southern 500, stock car racing’s oldest asphalt superspeedway race and a mainstay of Labor Day weekend, was moved from the date it had embraced since 1950.

For many, the Southern 500, a dynamic link to the sport’s rough and tough early years, almost died that day. The Labor Day weekend date went to Auto Club Speedway in California.

“I was incensed,” remembered lifetime Darlington resident Nina Huntley, a long-time worker and volunteer at Darlington Raceway. “It was obvious that NASCAR didn’t give a rip about the traditions we had here. What they were concerned about was spreading NASCAR across the country and getting more fans and money in. It was a political move to expand the fan base, but taking the Labor Day race was awful.”

A dozen years later, the race has come full circle. After existing in a sort of nomadic no-man’s-land on the schedule — with dates in November, on Mother’s Day weekend and in April, the Southern 500 is back at home. The race is scheduled for Sunday — Labor Day Sunday, back where, as people in this farming section of South Carolina will tell you, God meant it to be.

ROUGH ROOTS

Ray Branham’s father, W.D. Branham, was there at the beginning. Before the beginning, really.

Darlington Speedway founder Harold Brasington poses in his office in 1951 next to a photo from the inaugural Southern 500 from 1950.(Photo: ISC Archives via Getty Images)

A friend and business associate of Harold Brasington, Darlington Raceway’s founder, W.D. Branham owned a sawmill and lumber business about one-half mile from the track. After Brasington, a Darlington resident and sometimes racer who owned a construction business, visited Indianapolis Motor Speedway and decided the South also should have a large paved race track, he called on Branham for assistance.

When it opened for the first Southern 500 in September 1950, Darlington Raceway had a fence — although a rudimentary one. Branham cut the four-by-eight-feet pine posts that were placed around the track to support the horizontal fencing.

Ray Branham said his father cut the pine posts and delivered them to another location, where county prisoners coated them with creosote, a brown, oily liquid that added years of life to wooden pieces.

Although substantial, the posts were no match for stock cars running at ridiculously high speeds. “Those heavy cars would hit those things like they weren’t there,” Ray Branham remembered. “Hit them wrong and you’d go up and over and out of the track.”

The early Southern 500 years brought mayhem — and death. Stock cars had not run at these speeds — more than 100 miles per hour — over such a long distance. The frontier-like speed advances that would be seen at the giant Daytona International Speedway in Florida were still almost a decade away. For most of the 1950s, before the superspeedway construction boom of the 1960s, Darlington was “the” place for speed and daring.

And not all of it was pretty.

Driver Bobby Myers, a 33-year-old from Winston-Salem, N.C., was killed in a gruesome crash in the 1957 Southern 500.

Ray Branham attended that race with a friend. They were nine years old, and their family group had arrived at the track early enough to get prime parking against the infield fence near turn three.

“On the 27th lap, Fonty Flock spun out and stopped in the track near the end of the backstretch,” Branham said. “His car was painted black, and some people thought that made it so it couldn’t be seen easily.”

Whether that contributed to the wreck that followed will never be known. But Myers and Paul Goldsmith were rocketing along the backstretch racing for the lead when they approached Flock’s stalled car. Video shows Myers’ car running at full steam before it slammed into Flock’s car.

“Paul Goldsmith was right on Myers’ bumper,” Branham said. “Goldsmith later said Bobby never saw the stalled car. He said he could see Myers looking at him in his rear view mirror. When Bobby hit the car, his car went cartwheeling. The engine was thrown out of it, and the top was ripped back like a sardine can. Then Goldsmith hit the car, too. It was arguably the worst wreck in the history of NASCAR.

“It happened right in front of us. It sounded like bombs going off. I can still see that car going end over end. It was just terrible. The initial thing was so violent. I was pretty scared. It was certainly the worst thing I’d ever experienced.”

There would be other Darlington deaths over the years as stock car racing daredevils tested the limits of their courage and their equipment, but the competition went on. Although a spring NASCAR race was added to Darlington’s calendar in 1960, the Southern 500 remained the “granddaddy of them all,” as some of its publicity claimed, and Darlington became a motorsports capital of sorts.

“Labor Day was an excellent date,” Branham said. “A national holiday. It worked out so well. When you mentioned Labor Day, everybody knew you were talking about Darlington.”

For most of the track’s first 30 years, the 500 was held on Labor Day Monday. Although practice and qualifying were held the previous week, the Sunday before the race was an off day. Drivers, many of whom stayed at hotels and motels in the Darlington-Florence area, used Sunday to rest and/or party. Tales of wild days and nights around motel swimming pools survive — and are sometimes stretched — to this day.

In 1984, International Speedway Corp., which bought the track in 1982, moved the race date from Labor Day to the Sunday before the holiday, creating an automatic rain date if weather intervened.

The first running of the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway in 1950 was won by Johnny Mantz in a 1950 Plymouth co-owned by Bill France Sr.(Photo: ISC Archives via NASCAR)

BIG CROWDS

When Harold Brasington threw open the gates of Darlington Raceway for the first Southern 500, friends said he hoped for a crowd as high as 10,000. Estimates vary, but consensus from many who were there is that about twice that many fans crowded into Darlington to see the new spectacle. It was the biggest thing locally since a great tobacco harvest.

When the last ticket was sold, Brasington told workers at the gates to simply admit fans who paid the three-dollar general admission charge. There was no record of their purchases, a reality that would cause tax issues later.

That was of little importance on such an amazing day, however, as a standing-room-only audience watched Johnny Mantz grind through six hours and 38 minutes of racing to win the first 500. Seventy-five cars — almost twice as many as current fields — started the race, and to say the afternoon was chaotic is to understate it. The asphalt ate tires; some teams resorted to taking tires off passenger cars in the infield and putting them on the race cars, and the heat and humidity forced overheating cars to the pits.

“Nobody had any idea what to expect,” said Frank Willis, whose father, Gene Willis, helped Brasington build the track. They had worked together across the country during World War II building bases for the Air Force.

“There were so many people that it took three hours to drive from downtown Darlington to the track (a distance of about two miles),” Willis said. “Nobody anticipated how much traffic there was going to be.”

The NASCAR circus, still in its birthing throes, was in town. Over the succeeding years, area residents would come to know drivers and officials like family. Locals remember the late Fireball Roberts, a fan favorite, challenging Darlington hotshots to drag races on town thoroughfares. And, of course, winning.

Frank Willis, who was 8 years old when the track opened, later operated his father’s construction business. He became mayor of nearby Florence and now is Darlington County economic development director, a position from which it’s easy to see the benefits of the Southern 500’s return to September.

“The general concern when they moved the race was that Darlington eventually wouldn’t have a race at all,” Willis said. “They were building tracks all over the Midwest, and there was some real anxiety about whether Darlington would have a race any more.”

Now, Willis said, breathing is easier in the barbershops, hotel lobbies and bank boardrooms of Darlington and Florence.

“Bringing the 500 back is somewhat of a statement from NASCAR that Darlington is still one of the more venerable sites,” he said. “It has stood the test of time. It may not have the attendance you get in some of the big metro areas, but our attendance is about the same year after year, and that’s because it’s Darlington. For NASCAR to go back to Labor Day was a very positive statement that Darlington is going to be viable for a long time to come.”

If NASCAR has been viewed for most of its history as a distinctly Southern sport, the Southern 500 was ground zero for that sentiment.

Confederate flags still fly from fan vehicles in the track’s infield, even in an era in which NASCAR and many of the entities within motorsports have rejected the emblem of the South’s secession from the Union. For many years, however, markers identifying the track with the Old South were virtually everywhere, from an avenue of Confederate flags greeting fans to the rebel flag prominently displayed on souvenir programs and track signage to a speedway employee dressed in a gray Confederate uniform celebrating with race winners in victory lane.

Johnny Rebs and Janey Rebs were everywhere.

In 1958, that paradigm mixed with Hollywood’s version of the American cowboy as James Arness, star of the long-running television Western Gunsmoke, was a celebrity guest at the track. Arness was perhaps the biggest star in a line of Hollywood actors who stopped by Darlington during years in which the track successfully blended its racing culture with the concept of the movie/TV cowboy.

Arness’ visit was coordinated by the Darlington Police Department, which, in the 1950s, also managed the annual Southern 500 Beauty Pageant. The pageant, still in existence today, was held for many years in an outdoor setting on the frontstretch of the speedway the Saturday night before the 500.

When Arness came to town, he was a judge at the pageant, rode in the Southern 500 parade and made an appearance at the race. He also got a very fast ride around the speedway with superstar Curtis Turner.

“Imagine Arness, who was very tall (6-7), squeezing into a 1958 Ford and squatting down on the floorboard,” said Ray Branham. “He was holding onto a bar. Curtis took him around that race track within two miles per hour of the track record.”

Arness apparently was impressed. The town of Darlington was later worked into a Gunsmoke script.

NASCAR driver Curtis Turner, left, shakes hands with actor James Arness (R) who played Marshall Matt Dillon on the long-running television show "Gunsmoke" at Darlington Raceway in 1958.(Photo: ISC Archives via NASCAR)

Nita Huntley has a photograph from her childhood showing her posing with Arness. Her father, Preston Huntley, was a Darlington police officer and was heavily involved in activities at the track every race weekend.

She remembers the city buying its police force Confederate-like uniforms to wear during the 1958 race weekend.

“The whole town was all about the race then,” she said. “You couldn’t find a motel room from Columbia down to the beach. A lot of folks who came in for the race stayed with families in Darlington. The courthouse is on a grassy knoll in the center square in town, and people would camp out on the grass there. People were sleeping in yards, in churchyards. They slept in the back of pickup trucks. They were everywhere.”

Huntley sold tickets to the beauty pageant — $1 each for many years — and has worked at track concession stands. She now is involved with Darlington Raceway Ministries, which will have several booths at the track this weekend.

“You get all caught up in it,” she said. “People in Darlington don’t think so much about going to the race. The race sort of comes to them.

“Getting it back this year is huge. It’s hard to find somebody in the immediate area who isn’t involved in the race in some capacity. There are people who live near the race track who don’t even have yards. They have parking lots. They use them just once a year, but they use them. The idea of planting shrubbery just isn’t in the game.”

HAPPY RETURN

Harold Brasington has been described as the most dangerous sort of race fan — one with a bulldozer.

In addition to Darlington Raceway, Brasington built North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham (once home to Sprint Cup races), Darlington International Dragway and several other smaller motorsports facilities. He is described by his grandson, Harold III, as a dreamer who often put foundations under his wild imaginings.

After building the Darlington track almost on a lark, Brasington left the speedway in 1952 when financial problems — some stemming from the tax issues related to the first race — caused difficulties with track board members, Harold III said. But Brasington, who lived on Pearl Street in Darlington, remained tied to the country’s first paved stock car superspeedway, even if tangentially.

“I can remember when I was a kid him driving me to the track and going down through the tunnel to the infield on race weekends and visiting with Junior Johnson and Richard Petty and guys he knew,” said Brasington III, now 48. “He’d make me stay in the car because it was dangerous in the garage. Then he’d get back in the car and we’d go home and watch the race on TV.

“When he built and opened the Darlington dragway, he had a big Buick that had ‘Darlington International Dragway’ painted down the sides. When it came time for the Southern 500 parade, he’d come in from a side street and join the parade, get some free advertising. I was just a kid then, in the ’70s, and I’d ride with him, scrunched down in the front seat because I was sort of embarrassed.”

Brasington also retained enough friends at the track that he occasionally could drive onto the property and take his grandson for a spin around the oval. “He’d say, ‘Now, you can’t tell Mama,’ which is what he called his wife,” Brasington III said.

Harold Brasington died in 1996. He was 86 years old.

His grandson and other family members will be guests of honor at the track when the race Brasington started returns to its original date on the calendar.

“It’s like getting a piece of your childhood back,” Brasington III said. “I can remember sitting on Cashua Street as a 10-year-old kid watching the floats in the parade go by. School was back in by then, and all the tobacco was out of the field and in the warehouses.

“When that parade came through, you knew something big was about to happen. That was part of the cycle of fall around here. It was the pinnacle of the year. It was a very nice nostalgic time that we’re glad to see back.”